Two Kinds of Careful
If a knife is really sharp, you have to be very careful with the edge: it’s going to efficiently cut whatever it touches. If a knife is really dull, you have to be very careful with the pressure you’re exerting: it’s going to be difficult to stop if the blade slips off to one side or it suddenly plunges through.
The first kind of careful requires you to be attentive and skillful.
The second kind of careful demands much more of both.
The Classic Hammer Problem
It suggests that you don’t actually have any other tools; just a hammer. Maybe even only one kind of hammer.
That’s always been an oversimplification—a useful one, to be sure—but we’re way past that now. We’ve got every kind of hammer and screwdriver and saw and pliers you can imagine; both metaphorical and literal.
I think the more difficult and realistic scenario is that we find ourselves faced with a problem and the hammer is already in our hand, tempting us with an immediate, if inappropriate, solution.
P.S. This is the blessing and the curse of having a multi-tool in your pocket at all times: it’s extremely convenient and it’s good enough at solving most common problems that it discourages going to the effort of fetching the right tool when the occasion demands it.
Little by Little
I’ve noticed that a little writing on most days adds up to more than a bunch of writing on the rare occasions when I can make time to do a bunch of writing.
And that I can do a bit of exercise every day, but I can’t really pack an enormous amount of exercise into three hours after sitting on my butt for two weeks straight.
And that cooking one dish here and there during the week is way easier than trying to cook five dishes all in one afternoon.
There’s an attraction to doing something big and all at once—a great big spike of activity and productivity—but all the little spikes add up, too.
Deep Dive
Somehow SCUBA diving came up in a conversation a long, long time ago. I was in the Netherlands for work and the client was kind enough to spend an evening entertaining me during my visit there. He told me that apart from the obvious dangers of being underwater and surfacing too quickly from too great a depth, SCUBA diving had a more subtle danger: hypothermia. Since I don’t do diving of any kind (SCUBA, sky- , platform, spring-board or dumpster) this was new information.
But first, a diving joke:
Q: What’s the difference between SCUBA diving and skydiving?
A: If you’re SCUBA diving and you run out of air, there are some strategies and techniques you can use to help you survive. If you’re skydiving and you run out of air—you’re simply out of air.
Hypothermia made some sense, since being in very cold water can certainly be a serious hazard, but a lot of people dive in warm water, wearing wetsuits or drysuits. Heat loss through contact with the water is still happening, though. Consider that if you dive for work, say, doing underwater construction, you probably have to wear a heated suit and mask to keep from getting too cold. A further complication is that when you get out of the water and you sit in the boat with a wetsuit on, the evaporating water removes an enormous amount of heat from your body.
But the really difficult issue is that you’re breathing cool, compressed air or, if you’re diving deep, a compressed mixture of oxygen and another gas like nitrogen or helium. In any case, it’s already cold (since it’s in the water) and when it comes out of the SCUBA tank, it expands and as it does so its temperature drops even more. (This is described by Boyle’s Law, well-known by chemistry students everywhere.) You’re losing heat through your lungs with each breath.
So you’re in water that’s most certainly colder than your skin and the only “air” you have available is quite chilly: You’re getting colder from the outside-in and the inside-out.
Our bodies will begin to shiver involuntarily if we become cold, but this is a little tricky, too, because our skin is really only good at detecting relative changes in temperature. You can slowly get very cold without starting to shiver or even feeling very cold. And on the other hand, it can be very challenging to successfully re-warm a severe hypothermia victim: if they suddenly feel warm and cozy inside a rescue blanket, their body may actually stop shivering and subsequently freeze to death.
It’s strange to think that the obvious problem—breathing underwater—is in some ways rather straightforward to deal with, and that hypothermia is more serious. Some hazards are more dangerous simply because they can happen slowly, and some solutions are dangerous if they’re applied too hastily.
Every Technology Since Fire
Before fire was mastered things were, in fact, simpler. By definition, there was no gathering of firewood, making the fire, stoking the fire, yelling at the kids to stay away from the fire, cleaning up around the fire pit, etc.
After fire, there was a lot more to do and there was a lot more to think about: who’s going to keep the fire going, when are they going to be back with more firewood, where should we build tomorrow’s fire ‘cause this spot sucks and don’t even get me started about how bad the smoke is from this crappy wood.
And more serious considerations: getting badly burned, accidentally burning down your house or having to flee the area because now the meadow is on fire. But fire meant warmth, protection and the almost immeasurable benefits of cooking.
Every technology developed since then has had complications: maintenance, second-order effects, misuse and abuse—and just plain difficulties when trying to use it. Just getting a new technology to work at all is hard, but I think it’s much harder to see clearly in advance what kind of complications might arise when the adoption and use of it scales up.
Because we’re far more clever at using things that already exist than we are at making brand new ones.
Disguises
Exercise is play disguised as work.
Philosophy is highly-ordered curiosity disguised as a trifling distraction.
Writing is thinking disguised as mere recording.
Cooking is loving-kindness disguised as housework.
Reading is adventure and exploration disguised as idleness. (So is meditation!)
A Small Set of Sharp Tools
This summer I’ve been trying to repair several windows of my 125 year-old house. They are double-hung, wooden windows. When I got started I thought that a few of them would need to be re-glazed, but as it turns out almost all of them need to be re-glazed. And joints repaired. And rotten wood consolidated. And glass replaced because, you know, fragile… And lots of painting.
Good tools are necessary for any endeavor like this, and so I gathered up scrapers and clamps and sandpaper and special window tools and putty knives. And what I’ve found is that among all of those tools, I need two of them the most: a claw-type paint scraper for getting the 3+ layers of paint off the exterior and a razor blade scraper. And of those two, the razor blade scraper is by far the most important.
I use the razor to remove the tenacious bits of glazing by slicing underneath it or making cuts into it, because I can do it surgically and without breaking the glass. I use it to help free old glazing points embedded in the sash like Excalibur. It works wonderfully on some of the heavily painted areas because I can get underneath all the layers instead of having to work my way down through them with the claw scraper. It’s indispensable for cleaning up the glass after I’ve taken it out of the sash or re-glazed it. Even when it’s dull it’s still useful to carefully pick at or wear away stubborn paint.
It’s great to have sophisticated tools for highly-specialized tasks, and multi-function tools certainly have their place, as well. But there’s a certain quiet, almost unremarkable wisdom in having a small set of “sharp” tools: simple, powerful tools that can be applied in flexible ways.
Tigers in Cages
Our oldest cat is 19 years old, yet with some regularity she will tear through the house for a couple of minutes like a much younger cat: up the back stairs, down the hall, down the front stairs, through the dining room… I never know why, exactly, but one theory is that cats get bored and do this to amuse themselves. I think that might be right. Domestic cats are, from what I’ve experienced, still very much wild animals. A house cat is a small tiger in a large cage.
Just the other night our other cat caught a mouse in our bedroom. We turned the lights on to assess the situation and he was headed for the door with it in his mouth—no doubt to dispose of his quarry somewhere more private. Of course, there’s always a chance that the mouse will escape, because our cats aren’t necessarily hungry enough to eat a mouse immediately; it’s an evening of entertainment as well. We quickly closed the door to prevent his (the cats) escape and he immediately assumed a posture that asserted he wasn’t interested in sharing: a steady and slight downward gaze as he stood motionless, splitting his attention between managing the mouse and carefully observing our movements to take it from him: a wild thing, possessive of its prey.
Tigers in cages. Ours enjoy long hours of sleep on sunlit couches, specially-purchased pet beds or, preferably, fresh laundry. But there is restlessness as well: refusing to sit still in my lap while I work, pleas for attention, for stimulation, for a simulacrum of hunting and stalking. Pleas for a release of the animal energy that builds like water behind a dam.
We are tigers in cages* and when we dream, we dream of freedom.
* I know we’re not “tigers”, we’re “monkeys”. But “monkeys in cages” just isn’t as evocative, and keeping monkeys and tigers in the same cage seems like a questionable zoological practice.
Sorry, Sting…
As much as I hate to disagree, we are not spirits in a material world.
We are animals—sophisticated, spiritual animals—but animals nonetheless who happen to be just clever enough to occasionally fool ourselves into thinking that we’re not.
Feedback
Make the bed—done.
Put all the dishes away—done.
Write a page—done.
Mow the lawn—done.
I haven’t been out for a run in far too long, and I’ve been beating myself up about it lately. But I’ve also noticed that as stress-relief goes, having some physical evidence that follows the effort, some clear visual feedback that I’ve accomplished something, is sometimes just as good. Seeing is believing.
Replay
A few years back my wife mentioned she wanted our big terra cotta planter moved from the kitchen out to the garage. It was about 2.5 feet in diameter, 2 feet tall and full of dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. One evening, I thought I’d move it by myself.
Anyway, the only way I could really move it was to grab the rim of the planter between my thumbs and fingers with a pinch grip, (the same way you might grab a really big piece of cardboard) lift it and unceremoniously waddle toward my destination. I made it through one doorway and then ever so slightly bumped into doorjamb #2. It wasn’t much contact at all, but just enough for me to lose the tenuous purchase I had on the rim. It fell all of 6 inches and broke under its own weight. Somehow I was able to replay the event in my mind mind 2-3 times in less than a second before I fully realized I wasn’t going to be able to catch it in time. Gravity can be a harsh mistress.
The same thing happened to me again today: I didn’t break a planter, but I had the “replay” experience immediately after I broke a pane of glass I was moving. Again, I had the surge of surprise, then anger and the sinking feeling of having broken something, and the instant review of the sound of the glass breaking and the feel of suddenly holding two pieces of glass instead of one. Again with the gravity!
The replay creates a feeling of helplessness. There is nothing I can do to fix either situation and in both cases I recognized the risk beforehand, anyway. I suppose that if I hadn’t been so integral in both events, the replay might help me make sense of what happened—maybe that why our brains do it. If a tree branch falls on us, the replay might help us see or hear something that we hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe it gives our brains a chance to fabricate some additional sign or signal that could help us next time.
But it’s probably most important to realize that if the replay isn’t helping you understand something better, it’s probably not worth watching.
Self-Titled
Thoughts have a knotty quality to them: they can be problems or solutions. It requires persistence and skill to either untangle them or to form them into something coherent and useful. They can be beautiful, awkward, impossible... And writing is a tool for working with them. And going for a walk can be, too, or maybe just sitting and stirring the coals of a fire: thinking without thinking. (Fire is, of course, profoundly meditative: the play of heat and light and smoke in response to prodding and poking and nudging.)
It was warm today—an excellent Fall day by any standard. As we drove home from an errand this afternoon, we stopped to admire two Sandhill cranes picking their way along the side of the road, scarcely far enough away from our car for social distancing. But they are watchful, observant. It is fascinating how their heads extend out in front of them, probing, then freeze in position while the rest of their body takes a step or two to catch up.
I tried to write in a journal while sitting outside this evening, the journal in my lap. I can’t. My penmanship is abject to begin with, never mind the geometric difficulties of not using a table. I cannot get comfortable, I cannot steady my hand, I cannot possibly make efficient use of the page. I cannot remember with certainty how to spell ‘necessary’ without spellcheck anymore. And it occurs to me that much techno-luxury seems to be sold with the idea of doing things in places you shouldn’t be doing them: taking a phone call in the bath, typing a memo during a massage, planning your next vacation from a hot air balloon ride. I guess there’s something alluring about solving a problem so effortlessly that you can also be partially engaged in recreational activities.
Finishing up that presentation on horseback while enjoying a mint julep, or designing a spaceship while rolling up the garden hose...
Anyway, writing in my journal provided a feedback loop: me holding the pen, pressing against it. The pen pressing against the page, which yields and accepts strokes of blue ink. The blue ink reflecting a bit of lingering sunlight back into my eyes, which are trying to untangle the thoughts pushing on the pen. The pen: a marlinspike for my thoughts. The cranes have amazing, long, sharp beaks—also like marlinspikes. It’s hopeless, but not serious.
Tonight we had warmed-up leftovers in front of a campfire instead of a television, the rapid evening chill on the back of our necks in the absence of the Sun; and the Moon and Venus next to each other, bright white conversationalists against the deep blue twilight. On the opposite side of the spectrum from our campfire and our darkening back yard.
I tried reading Walden once and found Thoreau to be mostly tedious, but I do keep coming back to something that resonates with me:
“I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is well adapted to our weakness as our strength.”
I want to believe this very much.
Clarity
Clarity might only arrive afterward: after you’ve done the work.
After you’ve written the email/article/book and revised it and sent it. After you’ve cooked the meal and re-seasoned it and eaten it with your family or guests. After you’ve started the workout and tweaked it and finished it.
Getting there is a pain in the ass because the silly thing won’t usually just tell you what it wants to be. You have to see what it responds to, what encourages it, what helps it thrive or come alive. It’s drawn to action and activity. It’s curious about what you think it is—or what it could be. It is patient. It may change its mind…
But it won’t even sniff around if there’s no scent to pick up on.
An Acquired Taste
My sister believes that people who comment that they like to eat or drink something exotic or unexpected and say that “it’s an acquired taste” are simply being pretentious asshats. (I suspect she’s often right.) And sometimes it doesn’t have to be unusual: even Alton Brown has said that coffee objectively does not taste good—it takes some getting used to.
I had some chocolate ganache spread over graham crackers while sipping a dram of Irish whiskey tonight, trying to think of something to write. I could blame the odd combination on trying to use up random foodstuffs because, y’know, quarantine, but really I would probably think that sounded good almost any Thursday evening. I actually prefer heavily peated Scotch and Mezcal, so I guess I like candy and smoky gasoline.
I didn’t start drinking until my 30’s. A colleague talked me into going to my first Scotch tasting, knowing that I didn’t drink anything alcoholic because to me it all tasted bad. I resisted quite a bit and only reluctantly and haltingly tried each whiskey on offer. I ended up really liking a 10yr Aberlour and not much else. Shortly after that, Laphroig and Lagavulin became my favorites. Go figure.
Coffee is another drink that someone (my wife-to-be) tricked me into liking via the gateway drug of lattes with breakfast. Now I only drink it black: French press, Moka pot, Aeropress, pour over, espresso. (I prefer to enjoy my coffee and dessert in separate vessels.)
I don’t understand these developments of my palette, but I’ve come by them as honestly as I have unexpectedly. They are pleasant surprises: perhaps not so much acquisitions as curious inheritances.
Off Leash
On our walk tonight, my wife and I came across a woman walking her cat, off-leash—a beautiful grey tabby. We have 2 cats—neither of them well-behaved enough to be outside at all, much less taken for an untethered walk.
Cats are tricky creatures. They purr and sleep and look cute. To be sure, some are more social or affectionate than others but they are, I believe, wild animals that have fooled us into thinking we need to take care of them.
They form routines and habits that are difficult to break, they effortlessly resist training of any kind, and their instinct to stalk and hunt is always just beneath the surface; just one slow blink away.
The grey tabby may have been taking her owner for a walk. Good for both of them.
The Technology Buffet
I don’t have a smart watch. I have a dumb, analog watch that I’m very fond of. It tells me the time with mechanical hands, like in the olden days. It’s attractive and simple and... soothing, in a way.
I know a smart watch would do more stuff for me. It would be more convenient or... something. I could probably watch NETFLIX or create a webpage on it. Yay.
And I know I probably don’t need a watch at all. My phone works perfectly well as a clock*, and I spend a lot of time with devices that already have clocks. I’m never really at a loss to know what time it is. But my watch is reassuring in its tangibility and immediacy.
We don’t have to eat the entire technological buffet. We can pick and choose and enjoy what works for us. And we’re not savages because we stalled… I mean deliberately skipped over Blu-ray discs and went right from DVD’s to streaming.
*On language: would it be weird if I had written, “My telephone works perfectly well as a clock”?
FutureAnimal
For as much as we might wish to, we cannot un-invent things. The popularity of a given product or technology may wane due to fashion or regulation; they may be “lost” or “forgotten” because something better takes their place, but inventions address a need, they solve a problem and so seem to persist. Vinyl records and vinyl jackets will probably always live on, for better or worse, even as they are eclipsed by bits streaming down from the Cloud and Gore-tex.
Which really isn’t the point. The point is we can’t go back to a time when we didn’t have recorded music or clothing made out of synthetic materials. We also can’t go back to a time when we didn’t have cars or microwaves or smartphones.
One of my main rants is that technology can unfortunately replace almost every form of effort that humans can engage in. Since there’s not really a biological force that notices this and says, “Whoa, pony! Let’s not use that labor-saving device!” we end up indiscriminately letting technology solve every problem we have; whether for survival, convenience or entertainment.
A Luddite might rail against technology and sabotage manufacturing (for all the reasons that we think Luddites did this but actually didn’t). A common-sense approach might be to emphasize the tenets of adequate physical exercise and moderation in consuming all things. A philosopher might illuminate and encourage greater discernment between things that truly enrich our lives and help us achieve a greater, fuller expression of our humanity and those things that merely amplify our fears and reassure our own ignorance, comfort and status.
But as I’ve hinted, the Luddites would fail. And moderation is for chumps (until we change the culture). And philosophy is stuffy and boring (even though it isn’t: people just don’t recognize when they’re doing it or watching it in action).
My perspective now is that since technological “progress” is inexorable, we might simply find ourselves these days in an uncanny valley: technology is good enough to give us nearly everything we want, but at the cost of our long-term animal needs like musculoskeletal health, good sleep habits and a liver and pancreas that are not waging open rebellion. It feels a little risky, but my bet is on better, more insightful design and more developed technology that allows us to be the human animals we are without needing to go backwards in time.
What Language is Telling Us
Language was born by appropriating parts of our brains that we use for complex tool-making. Spoken language made it possible for us to teach more effectively. It allowed us to hunt and gather more efficiently. Language quickly grew and spread because children absorb it and use it so readily.
Language invented stories and songs to better preserve itself. Then it infiltrated our vision system, leveraging our tool-making and tool-using abilities, to be written down on cave walls and clay tablets. Language became semi-permanent; it endured far beyond any individual speaker or group. Once language was written, propagation became much easier and more people learned it. Now language is everywhere and it’s preserved. Language wants to be voluminous and immortal.
Human cultures may at times lose their language for another. Their languages might endure sudden, profound disruptions and slow, meandering erosions. But no culture loses language completely, any more than an ocean would suddenly lose all of its saltiness. Language, it would seem, is now endemic to humans. Language wants to permeate humanity.
Perhaps more than anything, language wants to grow and develop and change. Language is never the same from moment to moment. It wants to become elaborate and sophisticated, and will develop complexities that are nearly ineffable when left alone with an isolated group of devoted speakers. It will expand to fill the considerable human capacity for nuance and intricacy. But language also desperately wants to survive: it will shed every extravagance and decoration in order to be useful to strangers in far-off places. Language seeks to explore and find other species of itself; long-lost relatives. It seeks contact and change and combination. A language will readily bend and blend with the force of another.
Language has co-opted our technology to further develop, grow and move. It has positioned itself to be an intermediary between us and nearly all of our tools. It may eventually become our only tool.
Language might outgrow us, having used us as a stepping stone on the way to the next thing it wants: independence from us.
Little Luxuries
This Spring my wife and I went for a chilly, drizzly, windy walk one morning to work up an appetite for breakfast. (Completely unnecessary: breakfast always sounds good to me.) Between the weather and the then-new stay at home order, we pretty much had the bike path to ourselves.
The birds seemed to be enjoying Spring. We saw a ton of robins, two bluejays, a Mallard duck couple, 2-3 cardinals: all out, singing their songs and doing their thing. Curiously, there was also a crawfish in the middle of the bike path about 40 feet from a footbridge that crosses a stream.
Ordinarily, I trust that animals know better than I do where they should be and what they should be doing, but in this case my wife and I decided to repatriate it to a more suitable habitat. I set him (He’s a guy, right? Should have asked directions, right?) down on the bank of the creek, where there were raccoon tracks in the mud from the night before. From the bridge, we could watch Bartholomew Crawfish (wife’s choice of name) slowly make his way down toward the water, accidentally rolling onto his back a couple of times, then righting himself. He was moving quite slowly, but deliberately. It could be my imagination, but he seemed relieved to stick his head back in the water.
Back home, we warmed up over hot oatmeal and coffee. Those comforts always seem to possess a depth beyond the ordinary when you’re cold and damp. A dinner companion of Ruth Reichl says it well in her book Save Me the Plums, “When you attain my age you will understand one of life’s great secrets: Luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.”